There’s a cat-shaped kettle that’s been in my family for generations. It’s played the role of a timekeeper. Shaped like a Persian feline — the elongated bone china tail making for the perfect spout — ‘kitty’ has been guarded fiercely by each generation. As children, we weren’t allowed to play within proximity of the cabinet in which she lived, for fear that the ball would smash the glass, and she’d suffer a tragic death. 

At every family function, stories would be exchanged around ‘kitty’. Everyone had something to contribute. 

That’s the thing about heirlooms; they outlive certainty but hold on to memory. They gather meaning not from where they were born, but from the lives they witness along the way. And, in 2017, two friends, Aanchal Malhotra, an oral historian, and Navdha Malhotra, a social impact and development consultant, started a digital repository to give such heirlooms a space to speak. That brings us to the Museum of Material Memory. 

Tracing family histories across collectibles 

Does your family have a piece of history lurking in a cabinet, perhaps, or hanging on the wall of the living room, or stashed within a photo album? 

That story can now have a stage. And the best part is that you can tell it yourself. 

Aanchal explains, “The museum aims to allow people to tell their own stories. It is a collective endeavour, an attempt to create an organic archive of material culture, not shaped by any single individual, but built through a crowdsourced community.” The crowdsourcing isn’t just by way of the team identifying and responding to submissions, but also through a process of extraction of memories and stories that the contributors do along with their family members to put the piece together.

Aanchal continues, “Every story we encounter reinforces why such a collective is important. Each one carries a nuanced idea or a resurfaced memory that makes it unique and deeply relevant. The very act of writing these stories to preserve them for posterity gives them a fleeting quality, because if they aren’t told now, they may be lost forever.”

Today, the ‘museum’ boasts over 187 stories. And, the driving force behind accumulating more, Navdha shares, has always been a sense of curiosity. 

“Everything that can seem so ordinary is........

© The Better India